When the Senate begins proceedings Wednesday to override President Obama’s veto of legislation lightgreen-lighting the Keystone XL pipeline, the upper chamber will simply be going through the motions. Supporters know a vote to overturn Obama’s rejection is doomed to fail.
“We’re working at it trying to get more. But I’ll tell you, at this point, we’re not above our 63,” lead bill sponsor Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., told reporters Monday.
No one in the minority is whipping votes to flip the extra four Democrats needed to join the nine who voted for the bill in January. Boosters of the 1,700-mile project might even lose Democratic backers who don’t want to cross Obama if the upper chamber clears a procedural hurdle Wednesday to hold an override vote Thursday.
“Nothing’s changing,” Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., told the Washington Examiner. “It’s inevitable. It’s coming back.”
Where advocates of the $8 billion TransCanada Corp. project go next is not clear.
Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn said a spending bill or some broader legislation, such as changes to how international oil pipelines are permitted, could host a Keystone XL measure. But the Texas Republican said he wouldn’t risk a Department of Homeland Security-style shutdown threat, in which Democrats blocked GOP attempts to scrap Obama’s executive order on immigration through the funding bill.
“The only people talking about a shutdown are our friends in the media and the Democrats,” Cornyn told reporters.
Hoeven and Manchin have floated attaching Keystone XL authorization to an infrastructure package Obama might sign. Both chambers are beginning work on a federal highway authorization bill, and Obama has touted his own infrastructure plan as a potential jobs booster.
But Democrats are confident that kind of sneak attack won’t work on the White House, which has maintained it wants to finish the State Department review of TransCanada’s application for a cross-border permit to complete the Canada-to-Texas pipeline’s northern leg.
“I guess we’re going to see it again, but the president is going to continue to veto it,” Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., told reporters recently.
Regardless of what happens with the veto — or even the White House’s final verdict, if it’s a rejection of the pipeline — Republican leadership in both the House and the Senate vowed last week that Obama’s third veto wouldn’t be the last note on the oil sands project.
“The allure of appeasing environmental extremists may be too powerful for the president to ignore. But the president is sadly mistaken if he thinks vetoing this bill will end this fight. Far from it. We are just getting started,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, wrote last week in an op-ed for USA Today.
Keystone XL’s congressional, union and industry supporters say the pipeline will be a jobs boon, pointing to the State Department’s estimate of 42,100 jobs during the project’s two-year construction. They also say Keystone XL would strengthen U.S. energy security by displacing Venezuelan imports with Canadian crude.
Pipeline supporters say Obama has had enough time to rule on the project, as it has been under federal review more than six years. That process might be nearing it’s end, though. The State Department on Feb. 2 collected inter-agency comments used to decide whether Keystone XL is in the national interest.
After that ruling, though, there’s no deadline for Obama to make a final decision.
“I think it will happen before the end of my administration,” Obama told Reuters Tuesday when asked for a timeline. When pressed on whether that meant within weeks or months, the president responded, “Weeks or months.”
While Obama hasn’t weighed in on whether he supports or opposes the pipeline, he recently has spoken negatively about the project. He has downplayed the effect it would have on jobs and echoed environmentalists’ claims that much of the crude it would transport is destined for export, though experts say there’s little merit to that argument.
Still, Obama has said his Keystone XL decision rests with whether the pipeline “significantly exacerbates the problem of carbon pollution.”
The State Department’s environmental impact statement said it wouldn’t, because oil sands would come out of the ground with or without the pipeline. The Environmental Protection Agency, to the delight of environmentalists who argue Keystone XL is a linchpin for oil sands growth, has challenged that conclusion in light of lower oil prices.
The waiting game will continue after the eventual override vote. On that note, Cornyn made a point — perhaps inadvertently for the Democratic critics who criticized Republicans for making Keystone XL its first bill of the new Congress — with which both Keystone XL detractors and proponents might agree.
“In a country that has 2.5 million miles of oil and gas pipeline, why has this … become so controversial? It’s become a political symbol way out of proportion to its actual individual significance,” he said.
